Chapter 22
The next day, the market square was full.
Benjamin came down the lane at a quarter past nine with his coat open and his hands empty, and he did not stop at any of the stalls. He walked to the middle of the square, where the cobbles rose to the old well, and he stood there in plain view like a man waiting for a coach.
Word went round the way word goes round in a village of nine hundred. Within four minutes the noise had dropped by half.
Maddox's men were where they always were on a market morning — two at the inn's corner, one at the top of the lane, three moving loose through the stalls. They had been in Ashcombe eleven days and they had settled into the pattern of men who believe they are the most dangerous thing present.
"Gentlemen." Benjamin did not raise his voice much. He did not have to; the square had gone quiet enough to carry it. "I am told you have been asking after me."
Nobody answered.
"I am told you have asked the butcher. And the innkeeper. And the smith, and a girl who serves at the Painted Mare, and Mr. Thomas Ford, whose children were mentioned by name." He let that sit for a moment. "I thought it discourteous to keep making you work for it. So here I am. Ask me directly."
At the inn's corner, Maddox set down his cup.
"You have my name," Benjamin went on pleasantly. "You have had it since before you crossed into this town. And I have yours, Captain Maddox — I had it within a day of your arrival, which I mention not to alarm you but because I would hate for either of us to pretend."
"That is unexpectedly direct," Maddox said. "Captain Sterling. Or Mr. Russell. Whichever it is you are using at present."
Benjamin turned a slow half-circle, taking in the stalls, the crowd, the shuttered upper windows where people had appeared.
"Since we are being direct: who is responsible for the fire at Whitfield?"
The silence took on a different quality.
"It is a simple question. Somebody burned a garden at midnight and left a lady standing barefoot in the ash. Two men were seen on the wall road at eleven." He spread his hands. "I am not accusing anyone. I am only observing that Ashcombe can feel it when something changes."
Maddox was moving now. Not fast. Unhurried, hands loose, the way a professional crosses ground he intends to own — and Benjamin understood exactly why he was coming.
Every second the man stood at the inn's corner was a second the square listened to somebody else.
He had to close the distance and take the floor back.
He got eleven paces.
The rope came up out of the wet cobbles at shin height — two lengths of hemp threaded through the gutter channel that morning, held slack by two men who had spent a week learning precisely which stone Maddox stepped on when he crossed to the well.
They pulled.
Maddox went down like a felled door. Not gracefully. Full length, arms out, his hat rolling away across the stones and coming to rest against a crate of turnips.
Somebody laughed. Then everybody did.
It rolled through the square in a great ugly wave — the butcher, the girl from the inn, the boys on the wall, forty people who had been afraid for eleven days finding out all at once that the thing frightening them could be put on its back by a piece of string.
Maddox came up on one elbow, and the expression on his face was not rage. It was disbelief. He looked at the rope. He looked at the two grinning workmen holding the ends. He looked as though someone had handed him a page of arithmetic that would not come out right.
"You expected something else," Benjamin said.
He had not moved from the well.
"You expected a maneuver. Something clever, out of the field manual, the sort of thing they teach at the depot with my name attached to it.
" He tilted his head. "You have been eleven days in this village waiting for me to do something worthy of your attention.
Captain — I want you to understand me clearly.
Those tactics are for warfare. This is not warfare. "
He glanced down at the rope.
"This is practice."
The laughter went up again, worse this time.
Two of Maddox's men were already moving in from the stalls, and their hands were not loose any longer.
Maddox looked at them and gave a single short nod, and they stopped where they stood.
He stayed on one knee. He drew his knife, took up the nearer length of rope, and cut it, and then reached across and cut the other, and he did it slowly, so that everyone in the square could watch him do it.
"No more cheap tricks," he said.
Then he stood, and brushed the wet off his coat, and when he lifted his head his face had gone entirely calm.
"You will come with us, Mr. Russell. For questioning, regarding this morning's incident." He returned the knife to his belt. "A man was assaulted in a public square. Someone must answer for that. Consequences." A thin smile. "I am sure the notion is familiar to you. From your army days."
"Life," Benjamin said. "Not days."
"As you like."
"And on what ground am I suspected of anything? I have not moved from this step. Forty people will tell you so."
"We will find something." Maddox said it without any particular emphasis, the way a man states a matter already settled. "One way or the other, you are coming with us."
"I did it."
The voice came from over by the flower stall, and it was not steady at all.
Jacob stepped out from among the villagers. His face had gone the color of paper and his hands were shaking badly enough that he put them behind his back to stop it, and he did it anyway, and he did not look away from Maddox while he did it.
"I pulled the rope," he said. "So it is me you will have to take."
Nobody moved.
Benjamin had gone very still at the well.
It was the one thing he had not planned for and the one thing he could not stop, and he understood both of those facts in the same half-second, and he stayed exactly where he was, because to cross that square now and put himself in front of the boy would only be to hand Maddox two of them instead of one.
The silence went on a great deal longer than it should have.
Then, from the far side of the well, there was the sound of a man setting his tools down on the cobbles.
Thomas did not say anything. He came across the open ground at his own pace, and stood beside Jacob, and put a hand on the boy's shoulder — and only then, when he was standing where he intended to stand, did he speak.
"He did not pull it on his own," he said. "It wants two."
"And I." The butcher, wiping his hands on his apron, coming forward two paces.
"I did." The girl from the Painted Mare, from the doorway, with a cloth still in her hands.
The blacksmith came out of the crowd without a word at all and went and stood at Thomas's left.
Then it stopped being possible to count.
They came out of the press in ones and twos, and most of them said nothing whatsoever — they simply left the crowd and crossed the cobbles and stood, and the space in the middle of that square went on filling until there was no middle left, and every one of them was looking at Maddox and not one of them was laughing.
Maddox turned his head slowly, taking them in.
His men had not moved. There was nowhere in particular for them to move to.
"Well." Baron Whitfield came through the crowd with his gloves in one hand, and the villagers made way for him without being asked. "With so many guilty parties, Mr. Maddox, I rather think the situation has changed."
"How so?"
"You cannot arrest everyone."
"I can arrest whom I choose."
"No," the Baron said. "You cannot. You may not lay hands on a single soul in this village without evidence, and if you do, you will answer for it before the assizes, and I will be the man who puts you there.
" He drew the gloves through his fingers.
"And you have no evidence. You have a rope that has been cut into three pieces by your own knife, and half a village of confessions, which is to say none. "
He turned and looked out across the square, and then back.
"What I saw, Mr. Maddox, was a man stumble on unfamiliar ground.
Which is no shame to you. The ground is unfamiliar to you.
You have been in Ashcombe a matter of weeks.
" He gestured, taking in the stalls, the well, the whole worn face of the place.
"These people have been here the whole of their lives.
Their fathers laid these stones. They know which one sits loose. "
Maddox's jaw set.
"It is you who will answer, my lord. For your betrayal. And I will see to it personally."
Something went through the square then.
Nobody said anything. But the men standing in that open ground moved — not far, a half-step, the way a crowd does when it has heard a thing it did not care for — and the sound of two hundred people shifting their weight at once on wet cobbles carried further than any shout would have.
The Baron looked around at them, and there was something in his face that had not been there in a long time. "I will remind you all that you are speaking to a Baron of this county, Mr. Maddox. A proud citizen of this village." He paused. "And above all, a father."
The first turnip caught Maddox in the shoulder.
It came from somewhere near the bread stall and it was thrown hard, and it was followed immediately by a second, and a third, because he had stood in the middle of their square and threatened a Baron in front of them — an old name, a local name, one of their own — and there was a line, and he had walked over it without appearing to notice.
Cabbage leaves. A wet fistful of parsnip tops. Somebody's small hard apple struck one of his men above the ear and the man swore and clapped a hand to his head. A woman in the second row was throwing eggs with real accuracy and no apparent regret about the expense.
"Enough."
The Baron raised one hand, and after a moment the square subsided.
The silence that followed had a different weight in it.
Benjamin came down off the step at the well.